When you shine a flashlight at a moving target you must point directly at the target. Even though the target moves, it moves very slowly compared to the speed of light coming from the flashlight. In contrast to the flashlight, when you attempt to shoot a shotgun at a moving target you must compensate for the direction and speed of the target, even though the target moves much slower than the speed of the shotgun's pellets. For example, many targets move at 40 miles per hour, which is 58.7 feet per second.(40 mph×5280 ft)/(60 min×60 sec)=58.7 feet per secondShotgun pellets leave a gun at about 1200 feet per second, and if the target is 30 yards away, then with no loss of speed it would take about 0.075 seconds for the pellets to travel to the target. However, pellets tend to lose speed, and the speed would be less than 800 feet per second at 30 yards. Thus the actual time would be close to 0.100 seconds. Since the target is moving at almost 60 feet per second, then the target will move almost six feet in the time it takes for the pellets to reach the target.
A typical shotgun shell (Target load) will have around 400 pellets, and at 30 yards most of the pellets will be contained within a 30 inch circle. Thus if you aim directly at the target you will miss the target by nearly five feet.(58.7 feet×12 inches×0.1 second)−(30 inches/2)=55 inches
The problem with hitting moving targets is helped greatly for some types of guns, such as a machine gun mounted on a airplane, by using tracer bullets. They provide visual feedback as to where the bullets are going relative to the intended target. However, with shotgun pellets, even though you are able see when a target has been hit, you still might be 12 inches off the center of the target and not know whether you were slightly ahead or slightly behind the target. And worse, if the target was not hit, there is no indication of where the center of the pellets went in relation to the target. It would be ideal if we could have a picture of the target and the pellets when the pellets have just entered the plane of the target. This might be done with powerful cameras that were radar controlled, but even then it would be hard to see the pellets against a bright sky at shotgun range.
The present invention provides a firearm training system for actual or virtual moving targets comprising a firearm, a trigger-initiated image-capturing device mounted on a firearm, a processor, and a display. The system allows a user to visualize the accuracy of a shot by showing the computed position of a firearm's projectile in relation to the target at the time that the projectile comes closest to the target.